This chapter focuses on my experiences of the conditions under which externally funded research is done by looking at a particular research workplace, the work practices that predominated, and the significance of research teams and mentors. I do this from the vantage point of hindsight as I look back over 40 years of research and to an environment in which research was akin to ‘learning a craft’. In many respects my life as a researcher is unusual. I have been in externally funded social science research throughout my working life and, for much of the time, in the same institution and in the same research unit. The place where I have worked is not typical. It is indeed in many respects atypical. Unlike most academic and research workplaces, in the first decades of its life it was devoted solely to the conduct of externally funded research. It also offered many of its contract researchers a degree of continuity and progression not experienced by contract researchers in other academic settings in which social science research is carried out. It therefore represents a critical case not only of a relatively ‘good’ research workplace – in the sense of offering the possibility to sustain a research career – but also one from which to judge the effects of wider changes in research and academic environments that have taken place over its duration.

First, however, I should say something briefly about the general structures for social science research in order to set my experience in context. There are various models for conducting social science research which in effect form a continuum. At one end are individual or personal academic projects where an individual reviews, analyses, thinks and writes about some issue in their area without external support. Near to this are externally funded projects or fellowships that involve an individual academic with limited or partial funding for administrative support and field-based activities. Historically, however, most externally funded social science research has been carried out in university departments where a lecturer or professor applies for the funding, directs the research and oversees contracted research staff who do most of the data collection and analysis.